The Web Standards Project is at it again, bless their agitated little hearts. The group has functioned since 1998 as a sort of volunteer enforcer wing of the W3C: you can pretty much picture them standing around cracking their knuckles and drawling, do what Tim Berners-Lee says and we won't hafta hurt youse, got it? Despite struggling to regain relevancy in the wake of the browser wars, these gadflies for justice haven't given up; they're launching new attacks on several fronts, fighting for web accessibility, unobtrusive DOM scripting, and better standards support in Microsoft Visual Studio and ASP.NET. And this time it's personal!

I tease, but I do so with respect. I'm sufficiently obsessive myself that I
won't allow a WYSIWYG generator anywhere near my personal websites; they're
hand-coded all the way, baby, with fluid columns and CSS rollovers instead of
rigid tables and nasty JavaScript, and every page run through the W3C's markup validator service. I even went far
enough to make sure the sites render properly in Amaya, the W3C's own relentlessly
stringent editor/browser.

If you've never viewed the Web through Amaya, it's probably worth a shot, just
to see what the world looks like to a W3C stalwart. It looks, in a word,
broken. Many pages aren't even readable, and as far as most interactive
content goes, fahgettaboudit. If this is how they see the Web, it's no wonder
that the WaSP folks talk about the Internet in near-apocalyptic terms. "Most
of the Web remains a Balkanized mess of non–valid markup, unstructured
documents yoked to outdated presentational hacks, and incompatible code
fragments that leave many millions of web users frustrated and
disenfranchised," the WaSP site complains. "W3C
standards, supported in all popular browsers, are the only means of ensuring
that the sites you build today will work for all—today and tomorrow. If not
now, when? If not you, who?"

They're a wee bit shrill, it's true. But their message, beneath the
reproachful tone, is one of hope. Take the JavaScript
Manifesto that launched WaSP's new DOM Scripting Task Force. In it,
Peter-Paul Koch writes: "Many talented front end developers, especially those
who are standards-aware and work with CSS a lot, are afraid of JavaScript,
both because it's a programming language and because of the many mistakes
made in JavaScript's history. Unobtrusive thinking will remove these ancient
fears by making JavaScript fall in line with the rest of the standards
compliant techniques. JavaScript belongs in the bag of tricks every web
developer should carry."

WaSP isn't crusading against JavaScript; it's out to redeem the language by
creating a set of guidelines and best practices. That's helpful work that
will benefit many, many web designers. Heck, maybe when they're done I'll be
able to replace those CSS rollovers without shame.

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